Julius Malema

No one in South African politics is disliked with more enthusiasm, or defended with more loyalty, than Julius Sello Malema. He is arguably the country's most gifted political performer, a former ANC Youth League firebrand who was thrown out of the governing party in 2012 and returned a year later with a red beret, a party of his own and a programme the ANC had spent two decades avoiding: take the land, nationalise the mines, and say out loud that political freedom without economic power was a poor bargain.

The strategy worked, for a while. The Economic Freedom Fighters entered Parliament in 2014 with 25 seats, grew to 44 in 2019, and turned the National Assembly into something closer to a contact sport. Then the growth stopped. In 2024 the EFF's vote fell for the first time, Jacob Zuma's new MK party ate into its base, and Malema's co-founder walked out. In April this year a magistrate in the Eastern Cape sentenced him to five years in prison on firearm charges arising from a rifle he fired into the air at a party rally in 2018.

He is appealing, and remains free and in Parliament while he does. This profile takes the record in four parts: how he rose, what the EFF actually achieved at the ballot box, the legal cases that now shadow him, and the arguments made for and against him by people who follow South African politics closely. The verdict is left to the reader.

Malema grew up poor in Seshego, a township outside Polokwane, raised by his mother and grandmother. He was recruited into ANC structures as a child, became national president of the Congress of South African Students in 2001, and by 2008 was president of the ANC Youth League, the movement's traditional launchpad and pressure valve. He used it to campaign hard for Jacob Zuma's rise to the presidency, declaring in 2008 that he was prepared to kill for Zuma, a line that followed him for years.

The alliance did not last. Malema fell out with Zuma's leadership and was expelled from the ANC in 2012 for sowing division and bringing the party into disrepute, charges that included comparing Zuma unfavourably with Thabo Mbeki and remarks about regime change in Botswana. In 2013 he founded the EFF with Floyd Shivambu, and the following year entered Parliament as the leader of a party that had existed for ten months. The red overalls and berets were a deliberate provocation: his MPs dressed as domestic workers and miners in a chamber of suits.

The electoral story divides neatly into two halves. From a standing start the EFF took 1.17 million votes and 6.35% in 2014, then grew to 1.88 million and 10.80% in 2019, becoming the third-largest party and the official opposition in three provinces. For a party barely six years old, in a system dominated by the ANC's liberation credentials, that was a serious achievement.

Then 2024 reversed it. The EFF took 9.52% and 39 seats, its first decline, and was pushed into fourth place by uMkhonto weSizwe, the party Jacob Zuma launched months before the vote. The clearest evidence of where the votes went is in KwaZulu-Natal. The EFF had built its share of the National Assembly vote there from under 2% in 2014 to nearly 10% in 2019. In 2024 it collapsed to under 2.5%, in the province where MK took about 45%.

Malema has spent most of his political life in and out of court, and the results are more mixed than either his supporters or his critics tend to admit. He has won cases that mattered, lost others badly, and has never been charged over one of the most serious sets of allegations against him, which he denies.

The case that made him internationally famous is the “Kill the Boer” chant, an anti-apartheid struggle song. The Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum argued it was hate speech. In 2022 the Equality Court disagreed, finding that a reasonable listener would not take it as a literal incitement, and the Supreme Court of Appeal upheld that in 2024, with the Constitutional Court refusing leave in March 2025. He lost a separate hate speech case in August 2025, over remarks at an EFF gathering in October 2022 in which he told supporters they must never be scared to kill; the EFF said it would challenge the ruling. And in April 2026 he was sentenced over the rifle he fired at the EFF's fifth birthday rally in 2018. The trial court allowed an appeal against the sentence but refused leave to appeal the conviction, and he has since petitioned the High Court in Makhanda for leave to appeal both.

Few politicians produce such incompatible readings from serious observers. To some he is the only figure who forced South Africa to confront the economic settlement of 1994; to others he is a demagogue whose programme would wreck the economy and whose conduct mirrors the corruption he denounces. Both readings draw on real evidence, set out below.

South Africans vote in municipal elections on 4 November 2026, and for Malema the stakes are unusually concrete. He needs to show the 2024 result was a wobble rather than a trend, to prove the EFF can win back ground lost to MK, and to do it while carrying a five-year sentence through the appeal courts.

The polling gives him something to work with. An Ipsos survey conducted in June and July 2026 put EFF support at 27% in Buffalo City, well above its 2024 national share, though Ipsos cautions that its Buffalo City sample is small. Its standing varies sharply between metros, and the Democratic Alliance polls 46% in Cape Town. Only about seven in ten of those surveyed said they were registered, and a sizeable share of registered voters said they did not intend to vote, so mobilisation may matter more than persuasion.